Our happiness level is not permanent in our lives
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Usually it is the belief that happiness follows the curves of the U-shaped curves-with the peaks at the beginning and end of life.
The sample was popularized by researchers David Blanche and Andrew Osold in 2008 in a seminal paper based on the data of 100 million people. Since then, it has been held as a common belief and has been the subject of mainstream books.
But at the University of Munich’s Munich, Germany, Fabin Curtis and Joseph Bradel – both say that this belief could be wrong.
Kurtz says he was encouraged to review the claim “because [the U-curve] I did not reflect my personal experiences with old people. “So the couple looked at the annual social and economic panel survey in Germany between 1984 and 2017 for 70,922 adults participating in the survey.
Instead of making U -shaped curves, they found that happiness usually decreases gradually during youth, until the end of the 50s of the people, when it starts to leave up to 64, then falls dramatically.
Kurtz believes that one of the reasons in previous studies is that he looks at the wrong results is that he ignores the deaths caused by suicide or poor health and promotes the pace of happiness. “You get the impression that after a certain age, happiness will only increase because the unhappy people are already dead,” says Kurtz.
“There has been a lot of debate about social sciences about the unmatched results-when new figures are collected, they disappear,” says Julia Rohr at the University of Lipzig. “But there is another, a low appreciation problem: researchers sometimes systematically analyze their data in a poor manner. This can yield results that are reliable, yet misleading.”
Others say the results indicate a new set of questions. “It is great to think about the article that we are really trying to find out in Research Research,” says Philip Cohen at the University of Maryland, “but he said that now we should try to know why happiness changes for a lifetime and if troubles can be avoided. Curtis and the breeders want to avoid speculation that they have seen the changes they have seen.
Osald says the article has “interesting results and all research should be welcomed”, but he added that the pair did not overcome factors like marriage and income, which could affect happiness.
He also said that only one country has been seen in this study, so we do not know that the results are applicable somewhere else. Kurtz says this will be an interesting place for future research, especially since these results can lead to policy implications. Kurtz says, “Previous scholars argued that we need positive action policies to help people deal with their middle life crisis.” “I don’t want to say that this is not quick, but our results show that the most important problem is to remove the decline in happiness in old age.”
Listening ear needs? UK Samaritans: 116123 (Samaritans Dot Org); American suicide and crisis lifeline: 988 (988lifline.org). Visit Bit.ly/suidehelPlines for services in other countries.
